The Pope Takes His Message to Brazil's Poor

Associated Press
Catholics carry the World Youth Day cross up stairs at the Penha sanctuary in Rio de Janeiro on July 13.

Days after his election, Pope Francis summoned Alberto Gasbarri, the longtime planner of papal travel, to his quarters at the Vatican guesthouse. For nearly a year, Mr. Gasbarri had been laying the groundwork for a trip to Brazil—plans that were left in limbo by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

The good news, the freshly elected pontiff told Mr. Gasbarri, was that the journey, planned for July 22 to July 28, would go forward without delay. But Mr. Gasbarri needed to return to Brazil immediately to redesign the papal trip.

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Pope Francis wanted a more robust travel itinerary than the one mapped out for his predecessor. He scrapped one of the two days of rest that had been set aside for Pope Benedict. More important, he wanted the trip to drive home what he considered the major theme of his papacy: ministering to the poor. Accustomed to walking the poorest neighborhoods in his native Buenos Aires, the pope is pushing priests to get out onto the streets to serve the poor. Brazil’s sprawling cities have some of the region’s largest and most violent slums. This past week the Vatican said the pope isn’t going to use his bulletproof popemobile during his public audiences in Brazil, opting instead for an open-top jeep to better connect with the crowds. The move raises safety concerns in one of the world’s most-dangerous cities.

Pope Francis’ meeting with Mr. Gasbarri was typical of the Argentine pope’s management style. Gone were the opaque messages and the chain of command favored by Pope Benedict.

In a more sweeping move, the pope is planning to rewrite the constitution of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative body, with the help of cardinals outside Vatican ranks.

For centuries the Roman Curia had been the ultimate expression of papal power. Dismantling the status quo wouldn’t be easy. Cardinals sitting behind desks in Rome wield authority over bishops and priests working around the world on matters ranging from doctrine to how Mass is celebrated.

L’Osservatore Romano / Reuters
On Holy Thursday, the new pope washed the feet of youth prisoners, part of a traditional rite, in Rome.

Pope Francis offered a striking bit of advice to the priests and nuns of CLAR, the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women—people who work at the lower rungs of the Catholic world’s pecking order—on how to deal with these powerful officials: Ignore them if you have to.

“Perhaps even a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine will arrive telling you that you said such and such thing,” the pope mused. “But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward.”

The pontiff’s trip to Brazil was an opportunity to demonstrate that thinking on a grand scale. Latin America’s population has exploded in the past five decades. As of 2010, Latin America’s share of the world’s Catholic population stood at 39%—more than Europe and the U.S. combined. Brazil—the region’s most populous nation with about 197 million people—is indispensable to the modern Catholic Church.

But the story of the Latin American church has been one of decline in recent years. The economic growth that has propelled the rise of a new Brazilian middle class is also eroding the appeal of organized religion in general. As in Europe and the U.S., more Brazilians are embracing secular trends that clash with Catholic teachings. The population of Brazil that calls itself Catholic fell to 65% in 2010, down nine percentage points from a decade earlier. In the 1950s, more than 90% of Brazilians identified themselves as Catholics.

In addition, evangelical Protestant churches imported from the U.S. or homegrown are on the rise. Brazil is a case in point: One-room evangelical churches now dot the landscape, from remote Amazon villages to the labyrinthine slums that surround the country’s major cities.

At one evangelical megachurch on a poor outskirt of Rio de Janeiro, evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia forged an electric connection with thousands jammed into his multifloor church with lively music and emotional—even joke-filled—speeches that enlivened the crowd.

Instead of preaching about social injustice, he spoke of personal responsibility and prosperity that seemed to connect with the aspirations of those present. In one of his sermons on rising from poverty, he cautioned that poor workers must resist the temptations to lend money to extended family and friends in need. “It’s a sin to spend money on anyone else if your own nuclear family needs it,” he said.

His sermons drew choruses of approval from his congregation of primarily working poor.

Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Pope Francis will visit the Manguinhos shantytown.

In an attempt to stem the flow of faithful to Pentecostal churches, some Catholic priests in Brazil have begun to adopt parts of the Evangelical playbook, such as raucous singing and occasionally speaking in tongues, to reach people who find the divine in emotionally charged church experiences. Brazilian priests like the Rev. Marcelo Rossi are packing megachurches with rock-star-like performances on big stages that veer far from the usual Mass.

Such grass-roots developments have been tolerated in Rome, but not encouraged.

Mr. Gasbarri and other Vatican officials began planning Pope Benedict’s trip in July 2012. To give the trip added momentum, the Vatican had timed the trip to coincide with World Youth Day, when more than a million young Catholics from around the world are summoned to join the pope in a weeklong spiritual pep rally.

Pope Benedict’s resignation in February left a question mark over the entire event. Upon taking office in March, Pope Francis moved swiftly to revive the trip. Brazil would provide Pope Francis with a poignant backdrop to advance his agenda: to show that his papacy, and the Catholic Church at large, stood firmly on the side of the world’s poor in the fight for economic justice.

As if on cue, cities across Brazil erupted in June with violent protests against government plans to raise public transportation tariffs. Protesters stormed government buildings railing against President Dilma Rousseff’s plan to spend billions to build stadiums and other infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil while schools and hospitals remained in shambles.

By that time, Mr. Gasbarri had been dispatched to Brazil with new instructions: To arrange for the pope to visit one of the favelas, the teeming shantytowns on Rio’s hilly landscape—as well as a detour to the town of Aparecida, home to a venerated statue of the Virgin Mary, which in recent years has become one of the most-visited pilgrimage sites in the world. The real goal of the excursion to Aparecida is to turn the global church’s attention to a strategy statement that then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio spearheaded in 2007 when he and other church leaders from across Latin America gathered at the shrine.

The document, which at the time garnered little attention outside the church hierarchy of Latin America, calls for “health, food, education, housing and work…guaranteed for all.”

The document also warned church leaders were falling out of touch with their flock and called on every Catholic to maintain a missionary state of mind focused on luring people back to the flock.

Huddling with his fellow Latin Americans inside the Vatican in June, Pope Francis confided that “Aparecida is not over. Aparecida is not simply a document. It was an event.”

The challenge awaiting Pope Francis in Brazil is to make the “event” of Aparecida resonate across his global flock. Rising income inequality is a world-wide problem. Examples of crushing poverty had by now become commonplace on the streets of Rome though nobody in positions of power seemed to really care, the pope said.

“On the other hand, the main stock exchanges go up or down three points, and this is a world event….This cannot be,” the pope said.

It was time to turn the tables or, as he put it, “flip the tortilla.”

Quo Vadis

In his first trip outside Italy, Pope Francis will visit Brazil from July 22 to July 28.

Monday July 22 The pope arrives in Rio de Janeiro, and meets with Brazil’s president and local officials.

Tuesday A day of rest for the pope, with nothing planned.

Wednesday A visit to the National Shrine of Aparecida near São Paulo and to the São Francisco da Tijuca Hospital in Rio.

Thursday A visit to Rio’s Varginha favela, where he will give a blessing. Later in the day, the pope will greet World Youth Day pilgrims at a ceremony at Copacabana.

Friday The Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, ceremony with youth at Copacabana Beach.

Saturday The pope will celebrate Mass at Catedral São Sebastião and lead an evening prayer vigil with the young people.

Sunday July 28 Mass will be celebrated at Campus Fidei, which can host more than a million people. At 7 p.m., the pope departs for Rome.
A version of this article appeared July 19, 2013, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Pope Takes His Message to Brazil’s Poor.

Read the original: The Pope Takes His Message to Brazil’s Poor